With Vexovoid, the Australian death metal aberration known as Portal refines its sonic grotesquery into a sharper, more calculated form. Still drenched in murk and otherworldly dissonance, this record marks a pivotal moment in their discography—one where the band embraces clarity without sacrificing the suffocating atmosphere that defines their identity.
From the opening pulses of “Kilter,” Portal reveals an evolved command of dynamics and pacing. The churn and crawl are still present, but the riffs are more deliberate, even vaguely decipherable. There's a grim elegance to the way the band balances violence and space, creating moments of almost-melodic eeriness that hang in the air like a rotting fog. “Curtain” coils and unravels with a ritualistic cadence, while “Plasm” drips and bends through surreal tremolo figures, each note warped like light distorted by a black hole.
The Curator’s vocals remain a vital presence—low, commanding, and buried just enough to feel like a voice calling out from beneath the ruins. It’s less a performance and more an invocation, woven into the fabric of the music rather than riding above it. The drumming, too, is precise but loose enough to feel organic, like tectonic plates grinding beneath the earth's surface.
The production on Vexovoid is its most striking evolution. Where previous albums like Outre’ or Swarth reveled in sonic obfuscation, this record allows the listener to peer slightly deeper into the madness. The clarity doesn’t dilute the dread—it enhances it, exposing every jagged edge and scraping frequency with dreadful intimacy. The ambient textures still lurk in the periphery, but now serve as eerie connective tissue between crushing passages.
Portal has always conjured imagery rather than traditional songcraft, and here that imagery feels even more vivid. If earlier albums were chaotic storms, Vexovoid is the architecture left behind in the aftermath—decaying, cyclopean structures that bend physics and time. Each track leads further into an impossible geometry, with “Orbmophia” and “Awryeon” pushing deeper into the void while clinging to threadbare notions of form.
Far from a compromise, Vexovoid is a triumph of restraint and vision. It channels the same unsettling energies that made Portal infamous, but with a new focus that sharpens the horror rather than dulling it. It may be more accessible in structure, but that makes the terror within all the more potent. This is death metal as psychological disintegration, refined into its most haunting form.
